The Future's Mine (18 page)

Matthias and I had once stolen her ‘divining stick’ which she waved over her collection of junk to read the future and replaced it with a toilet brush. She was ecstatic and proclaimed it a sign from the spirits who were encouraging her to clean up Brigadus with her magic. The superstition in Brigadus was a sort of benign damp squib – a placebo that calmed the nerves but didn’t actually do any harm.

But I could tell the type of beliefs that Rhian and her people followed were sinister; talk of light and dark, punishment and sin, leaving one of their own people to die without water. These people were dangerous and I felt my heart sink. There was no way we’d be allowed to fill up our flasks and leave with a cheery wave and a message of good luck.

Elgar stepped forward and held out his hands, a look of rapture on his face. But at that moment an unexpected
whooshing
noise filled the cave. It came from the mouth of the waterfall and grew louder and louder. People below began to shriek and run for cover, pushing each other out of the way, grabbing loved ones and huddling into corners or under the bridges. Rhian grabbed Matthias’s arm. She yanked him towards a cave set back into the wall beside the rock throne.

My captor dropped his grip and ran for his life, throwing himself down the stone stairs and skittering off towards his hearth to grab his family. I dragged Noah towards the cave where Matthias, Rhian, Sophia, and Elgar were crouched. I had no idea what we were running from but sensed that this disruption was something that the underground people were utterly terrified of. I saw Grimmy’s bewildered expression as he turned towards the source of the sound and, shamefully, I decided to leave him behind.

Perhaps this would be a convenient way of disposing of this particular thorn in my side. But he spotted our escape and clung onto Noah’s shirt, desperate not to get left behind. The survivor in him was indestructible – at the end of time I had no doubt that there would be nothing left but Grimmy lording it over his own kingdom of termites and cockroaches.

We dived into the cave just in time. A black swarm, more terrible and noisy than a thunder cloud, burst from the mouth of the waterfall, blotting out the starry light emitted by the glow-worms above. The swarm flocked as one, streaming out from the cave, down a passageway which I assumed led to the outdoors. I couldn’t make out what it was made of. Rhian looked at the swarm resentfully. It was an intense expression, not necessarily of fear but of hatred.

I noticed that she still had hold of Matthias’s wrist. Her creepy spider fingers encircled his wrist and her bone jewellery dangled against his fingers. I could see that he was twirling one of the little bones in his fingers carefully. The bone looked like a wing bone, tiny but arranged differently from a bird’s. It puzzled me for a moment. What sort of creatures apart from birds had wings? Quite suddenly, with a lurch of my stomach, I understood what the black swarm was –
bats
. A whole colony of them, leaving their daytime refuge behind the waterfall to hunt at night. Creatures of the night; rulers of the dark.

I looked up and made out their vampire bodies, swooping and diving. Bats were the only creatures we didn’t eat in Brigadus. Perhaps it was something to do with their gremlin ears, their fangs, their lust for blood, or that they had a mythical, almost evil, quality to them. Or maybe they were just too hard to catch. But no-one ate them, not even when mothers saw their malnourished children become little more than life-sized dolls, chests heaving, struggling for life. No-one would hunt them which meant that they had free reign in the night time over the marshes – their domain to be entered at your peril. It just seemed almost
profane
to eat them.

At last, the bat swarm began to peter out, leaving the warming glow from the glow-worms to filter back down to us, like sunshine after a storm.

‘The Light and the Dark,’ said Rhian.

Chapter Twenty

The scalding tea tasted of bitter leaves and grit. Noah was the only one of us who was polite enough to drink it all, gamely sipping it and proclaiming it ‘delightful’, with a grimace.

‘The water is taken from the river, it is as pure as any water can be,’ said Rhian, a rare smile unfurling across her face.

Matthias quickly reached for his tea, obviously keen to get a share of Rhian’s praise. I suppressed a smile when he took a sharp intake of breath, the result of scalding his mouth. I looked doubtfully down at the river, my eyes scanning the area where these people washed and I wondered where they did their ‘necessary business’; the water didn’t look that pure to me.

‘Thank you for your kindness in sharing your water with us. I understand that our arrival has caused a great deal of shock amongst your people and we’re pleased that you realise that we mean you no harm. But I must admit, I’m still puzzled by what you’re doing here and how you live. Please,’ said Noah, ‘tell us about your people. How did you end up here and what do you mean by the Light and the Dark?’

‘Yeah,’ I interrupted, ‘and tell us about The Reckoning. Do you mean the Flood?’

Elgar sighed and looked to Rhian.

‘This is most unusual. It goes against everything we have believed to be true,’ he said.

‘I think, Father, perhaps it might be time to expand our knowledge,’ replied Rhian; her eyes narrowed and she looked wryly at us.

He bowed his head in assent and said to no-one in particular, ‘A long time ago my world changed beyond all recognition, but I was glad of it. We were chosen, vindicated, only us and no-one else. I thought that I had survived the test sent to me and that I would never have to suffer such disruption and confusion again. But alas, I am proved wrong. Your arrival changes everything. I don’t know what to make of this; evidently we were not the chosen ones as we thought …’ His words petered out and he sounded resentful. His gaze was confrontational, as though we were guests who had turned up uninvited to his party.

 ‘The Black Swarm is the signal that it is night time. It is hard to keep track of time in the cave but we know when the Dark comes because of them. The Light is ever present.’ Rhian pointed towards the glow-worm constellation, ‘and we are glad of it – it keeps the Dark away and stops it from taking over permanently.’

‘So the bats are the Dark and the glow-worms are the Light? Is that it?’ I asked sceptically, thinking that even by Brigadus standards, their religion was a bit obvious. Rhian sighed.

‘It’s more than that. They are representations sent from the Spirit. The Spirit of the Earth. Let me explain.

‘A long time ago, more than thirty or forty years ago, my mother and father founded a movement called the Planetarians. They witnessed the destruction of the Earth by our ancestors and sought to rectify it. The Planetarians eschewed the trappings of modernity and sought to reconnect with the Spirit of the Earth which they believed was being killed by our rape of the natural world – trees felled, oil spilled, animals killed. It was terrible. But my parents had the courage and the vision to choose a different path, a better path. They were pioneers, saviours, heroes.’

‘My father and mother were the leaders and they amassed a large following. They were benevolent towards their followers and more came, eager to hear their vision.’ She indicated the two hundred or so people gathered beneath us. ‘You see, my mother has a very special gift. She
reads
the Earth. She can sense the elements, sense when they are in equilibrium and sense when they are unbalanced. Before The Reckoning, she felt that they were wholly unbalanced. Things had been knocked out of equilibrium because of human selfishness. Therefore, the Planetarians felt they were tasked by the Spirit to set an example, to live amongst nature and set the Earth along the track to equilibrium again. They were tasked by the Spirit of convincing the wider world of this.’

She shook her head and looked resentful. ‘I can’t tell you how derided, ridiculed, and scorned they were. It was a very trying time for my parents and their followers but they kept their faith. They were hounded as witches. Eventually, the witch-hunt got too much – the wider world didn’t want to be confronted by their sins against nature. Therefore, the Planetarians decided to forsake the wider world and moved into a remote wilderness high in the mountains to start again – that is, to create a civilisation in tune with nature that was not destructive. A better civilization, one guided by my mother’s gift. They took only what they needed or what they thought deserved to be saved. They cut off contact with the world and created their own paradise.

‘One night my mother felt a great shift in the elements. For some time, the balance had been swung towards the Dark – evil, destruction and ruin. But what she felt was wholly unexpected – never before had she felt the elements take such a determined route. The Light began to fight back.’

‘How did the Light fight back?’ asked Matthias.

‘It summoned the elements, of course. The Reckoning. Punishment for the sinners and their destruction. Punishment for those ruled by the Dark and not the Light. Water, water everywhere. Everything drowned. A wave of punishment. Everything gone … apart from the Planetarians and our little paradise.’ She smiled smugly. ‘We have been vindicated! Only we were saved by the Spirit. Only we. Only we were worthy. Only we will start again.’

It was a long time before anyone spoke. I fiddled with my shoelaces, feeling utterly upset although I couldn’t pinpoint the root of my feelings. I could see Grimmy hanging on Rhian’s every word, digesting her ideas and adding them to his own. They both believed in the most extreme solution – starting from scratch in the hope that something better would emerge. For Rhian, this time had already come and the unworthy had been punished for the abuse they had wreaked upon the earth and the Spirit. But for Grimmy, I knew that he was encouraged by what he was hearing, and that he would do everything in his power to make sure that the unworthy in Brigadus got their just desserts in retribution for their treatment of Regina. For him, she was the Spirit and the Light – innocence and purity. The Darkness that had ruined her would have to be abolished in his own version of The Reckoning. I caught his eye and saw the gleam in it disappear and melt into confusion. Oh dear … I posed a little problem for him. What if I was her daughter? I guess she wouldn’t be as pure and Light-filled after all. What would be the point in avenging her if that were true?

Noah finally broke the silence. ‘So … please help me understand. Why do you live underground? I just don’t understand why you live down here if you believe that the Spirit of the Earth has given you a paradise and granted you safety. Why not live on the surface?’   

‘Because that is the Garden and we mustn’t take from the Garden. The Spirit has created an Earth as it should be – free from interference. We are allowed to live but only if we live very discreetly. Nature has claimed back its own and we must respect that. We are the guardians of the Garden, not its destroyers. Besides, we believe that the Spirit has made our guiding element Water. That is why she led us down here to the waterfall and the Light.’ She pointed up at the glow-worms. ‘This is our home, tailored to us by the Spirit and we are thankful.’

There was something about her story that was irritating me. ‘What about the Dark? What happened to that man … Deddern … the one…that one that was killed … by me?’

 Her reply was like ice. ‘Do not feel sorrow about killing that man. He had been taken by the Dark and deserved his fate.’

‘He looked pitiful. He looked like he had gone mad and he looked starved and dehydrated and ill. What did you do to him?’ It came out more accusatory than I had meant it.

‘We did nothing. The Dark sometimes takes hold of people and makes them sin. The Light then expunges those who have sinned in order to keep the balance right. We can only be children of the Light here – this has been proved by The Reckoning. If the Dark takes you and you sin, you cannot live in the Light anymore.’

‘But what did you
do
to him? Did you cut him off and refuse him water?’ My hands were shaking and Noah reached across to steady them.

‘No, his own body rejected the purity of the Water. The Water is too pure for people of the Dark to partake of.’

‘What do you mean?’

She sighed and her face started to lose its indulgent expression. I could see the red blush of anger on her cheeks. I felt pleased that I was ruffling her. Matthias was looking from me to her, me to her, undecided which side he should take. He hated it when I was contradictory for no reason but I knew that he could sense the strange coldness that Rhian had started to radiate. It was heartlessness and, despite his gruffness, Matthias had a very sensitive awareness of others and their suffering. I could feel him retreating from her in distaste.

‘My mother reads the elements. She can sense when the Dark is starting to encroach on the Light and we have to decide to do something to get it back under control. We seek out the sinner. The Dark makes them do things – if they have taken from the Garden, if they have defiled the Water, if they have had bad thoughts … we know they have been taken by the Dark. So, we give them a test to prove themselves …’ she finished, slyly.

‘… A test?’ asked Noah.

I felt a rush of warmth towards him as his eyes fixed on Rhian’s unwaveringly.

‘Yes, a test. We send them to the Dark to see if they can defeat it. If they pass, we welcome them back. However, if they fail, and they cannot stand the Light and their body rejects the purity of the Water, we know that they have been taken forever and they are banished.’

‘How do you send them to the Dark?’ I asked.

She turned and pointed towards the mouth of the cave where the swarm of bats emerged from. ‘We ask them to spend five days with the Dark’s representatives … we ask them to live with the Black Swarm.’

The bone bracelet jangled on her wrist. She caught me looking at it. She twirled one of the bones coyly in her fingers, looking almost affectionately at it. It was the sharp claw of a bat. ‘For protection against the Dark. The Black Swarm comes twice a day but we protect ourselves with these.’

‘And where was Deddern’s protection when you sent him into that hell-hole?’ I was angry now.

She shrugged. ‘He had none, of course. If he was worthy, the Light would protect him. Obviously he wasn’t, so he was banished.’

I was so enraged that I suddenly had to stand up and pace the cave.

‘Maida,’ whispered Matthias, ‘please calm down.’

There was urgency to his tone. I knew he was worried that I was offending our hosts and that they perhaps would see us filled with imaginary Darkness and put us in with the bats. The cave system was winding and full of dead-ends, making it almost impossible to flee.

That poor man
. I shuddered at the thought of him having to live amongst the bat faeces, the carcasses of mice they had dropped, and, oh God, the stench. I bet it was unbearable. Unhygienic, too.
No wonder he went mad
, I thought,
bet it was
full of disease.
My heart began to pound as I fitted the last piece of the jigsaw in place.

Disease!
Since the Flood, Brigadus had been suffering from waves of diseases, carried on the ships from mainland Europa. Diseases that had been wiped out of Britannia had now been brought back and stalked the islands of the Periphery, claiming victims mercilessly. There was one disease that people were particularly frightened of as it had no cure; death was imminent within days and there was absolutely no hope of recovery. It was the vilest disease of all as it turned people into violent lunatics, making them dangerous to their loved ones.

We were warned by the Parrots to be careful of stray dogs, foaming at the mouth, acting erratically, baring their teeth. I once caught a Parrot pointing a gun at Wolf and I only just managed to plead for his life, after assuring him that Wolf was free of the disease. We all knew that the disease not only affected dogs … but also
bats.
Rabies. It all made sense.

If Deddern had been bitten by an infected bat during his five-day trial in the cave, it would explain his inability to drink water. Hydrophobia was a word taught to us by the Parrots in signs put up in the Market Square explaining how to spot the symptoms of someone suffering from rabies: ‘If someone you know has Hydrophobia (fear of water), is acting erratically or violently, has a fever, cannot speak and foams at the mouth, tell an Official
IMMEDIATELY
’. They would then storm your house, take out the infected person, and take them to a ‘safe house’ (which was most likely a dungeon where they could live out their last days dying of thirst and driven crazy by the disease).

My heart shrunk to the size of a walnut as I let the full implications of what had happened to Deddern wash over me. They were responsible for his death. They forced him into a cave with infected monsters because of some cultish notion of Light and Dark, sin and punishment. They then used his pitiful symptoms as proof of his evilness. I was shaking from head to foot and felt a desperate urge to break out of the cave, to run in the fresh air, to escape.

Noah, noticing my agitation, stood up and said, ‘Excuse us, we have been travelling far and we would like to fill our flasks. May we?’

Elgar nodded and said, ‘Fill up by the second bridge but don’t be long. Sophia would like to read the elements in your presence and perform a ceremony to speak to the Spirit. And you can tell us where you are from, strangers. We are still puzzled as to how you survived The Reckoning… I must admit, this is a most interesting situation and we’re very much looking forward to your explanation.’

Suspicion crept into his voice. I don’t think that he bought Sophia’s story that we were from the Light. Noah nodded warily at Elgar and began to steer me away from the waterfall by my shoulders. Matthias followed.

 ‘Noah! They’re crazy,’ I began, when we were crouching by the bridge, filling up our flasks. ‘They killed that man. They made him go into the cave with the bats and he must have got bitten and got rabies.’